With Trains of Fire and Dews of Blood
by Blue-Inked Frost
Summary: Carrie White is regularly attacked and tormented by her cruel classmates. Fortunately, Carrie at last finds a friend at school who wants to help her fight her bullies and sees her special powers as unique and wonderful. Unfortunately, his name is Jason Dean.


Heathers (1989) crossover with Carrie by Stephen King.

—

 _We know now that telekinesis, like hemophilia, is a sex-linked condition. Unlike hemophilia, it will only manifest itself in females. We have not yet mapped the exact genes. Therefore, until such time as we are able to develop a reliable test for TK, such females have the power of an unexploded bomb, embedded within our society at all levels._ \- _Modern Science_ magazine, Volume 8, Issue 2, Colorado.

—

Crack their BONES crack their HEADS they SCREAM at me and they THROW and they deserve the same thing to happen to THEM, Carrie White cried inside her head.

That Sue Snell left her alone now, after the nightmare time in the shower room, where they all threw tampons and napkins and toilet paper at her, clotted with blood and water, while her menstrual cramps burst and her stomach roiled. Chris Hargensen and her followers - her flunkies, her servants, her hangers-on laughing at every sick word that spewed from her pink evil mouth - did not. Pig-eyes Carrie, pimpled Carrie, cow shit Carrie, bleeding disgusting spewing Carrie.

The boys were as cruel as the girls, especially those like Frank Grier and Billy deLois and Henry Trennant. Sometimes they stuck out a leg as she walked past, or shouldered her roughly aside as they ran to chase each other. Carrie eats shit. Carrie bleeds.

Carrie White flexed _out_ with her thoughts, and something pulled and pressed against the world around her while her heart beat like it would burst from her chest. Carrie breathed in, breathed out, and gripped her books so tightly the covers cut into her hands. Ignore them. Forget them. You have only yourself in all the world.

Carrie barely looked up and out at her classmates. So she wasn't sure when she first saw the new boy, noticed a different face in her endless round of classmates and snickers and jabs.

Here at Ewen High School, everyone knew everyone else from childhood. Jason Dean was the only one from somewhere outside. She couldn't remember when he'd begun with them. Carrie recognized him even at a distance by the long black coat that blew around him in the wind outside. He didn't join in on tormenting her the way the others did. He had a similar look to that Billy Nolan, pale face, slicked and unkempt hair, one earring in his left ear, rode a motorbike from the school parking lot.

And he walked alone when he went outside. The boys called him faggot and shoved him roughly in that joking-not-really-joking way. He didn't fight back, never answered them, but he held his head high and looked like he could have pulverized them if he actually wanted to, as if they were lower than the shadows under his feet. Carrie found herself drawing a comparison, making a rough line between herself and the boy from outside like a scrape of white on a chalkboard, for all they never talked to each other. _Dog-face Carrie, disgusting Carrie, filthy bleeding Carrie, never look at a boy._

At lunch in the cafeteria, Carrie wrapped up her sandwich in its waxed paper and threw it away in the bin. Eating too much gave you pimples. She ate her apple and drank her milk slowly. _Momma says, have your milk or else._ Frank Grier was overloading on milk again, taking an armful of cartons from the lunch ladies, who never stopped him. He went past Jason Dean's table in the back and stole his, too. It was far from the first time he'd done that. The boys at Frank's table cheered as he showed off how much milk he could make disappear, gorging one after the next until his mouth and chin were completely painted white. Then, on the next one he swigged, something started to go wrong. Frank coughed and put a hand on his throat. His cheeks started to go red, then his entire face. He yelled, trying to swear, but the words didn't come out of his swollen throat. He gave a choked cry like a turtle being strangled. His entire face was red as fire, now. Frank ran over to the water fountain, turned it on, and shoved his face underneath it. He gasped and drank up, in distress while his friends laughed.

Carrie stared, hard, at Jason Dean. She suddenly laughed to herself, silly Carrie, cackling at something that nobody else could see. Only, this time, the boy in the black coat caught her looking at him. He raised his right hand, while Carrie and no one else saw him, while everyone else watched Frank Grier's hysterics. He let the tip of a syringe slip out of his sleeve; Carrie squinted at it. It disappeared a moment later.

There had been something hot, something like hot pepper slipped into the milk through a needle in the carton. Frank's friends turned their laughter on him, for he'd been defeated by ordinary milk. Frank gasped and drank from the fountain, shaking his head. His mouth was too swollen for him to call anyone pig-bitch or faggot for the time being.

 _If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies._ So it said in the Bible. Vengeance was the Lord's and the Lord's only, but Carrie put her hands over her mouth and laughed again.

Jason Dean silently got up and stalked away, disappearing through the back door of the cafeteria.

Carrie pulled up her chair for her math class. She only took math and phys ed with Chris Hargensen. Chris was a rich girl, a girl bound for college, laughing and sneering with her friends in the back of the room. Chris led the mob of eight girls against Carrie in the phys ed showers, pelting her with bloody Kotex and shrieking, _plug it up plug it up_ , and thick black blood ran down Carrie's thighs into the shower drain and it felt like she was dying. Carrie didn't look at Chris, shrunk into herself, and opened her desk.

Carrie's chair scraped backward on the floor and she let out a shriek. Inside her desk was all red and white. It was gory, piles of white toilet paper and sanitary napkins and tampons soaked red with - it couldn't be real blood, red paint or red ink or something worse, stained over the white wet mess that looked like a murder or a slaughterhouse. Her books were buried somewhere below it, she couldn't bear to touch it (worms rolling OVER her hands worms EATING them).

She stared at the class wildly, helplessly. Chris Hargensen was grinning, smirking, giggling with her friend, and Carrie knew she knew she KNEW -

"Carrie's on her period," Donna Thibodeau sneered to Chris, picking up on the theme even before Chris could prompt her.

The mocking laughter was everywhere, a chorus, and Carrie couldn't move, could only shake her hands and stare everywhere -

Above them, the light flashed and flared. A hairline crack ran down the centre of the lightbulb glass, directly above Carrie. A couple of the students lost interest in Carrie's desk and glanced upward, a little nervously.

Then the teacher walked in. Mr. Faylor yelled at the class to sit still. It calmed them down, a little. Carrie's eyes slid across everyone in the room, skipped over the boy in the black coat in the back. Then something made her glance back at Jason Dean. He was calm with his expression unchanged, not laughing at her, unlike all the others. He looked up at the ceiling, thoughtfully studying the crack that had appeared in the lightbulb. Then he looked at Chris Hargensen, and Carrie knew that he knew it was Chris.

"Carrie, what is this?" Mr. Faylor asked, with a sigh. "Did you ..." _No, no_ , she shook her head; tears she could not stop ran down her cheeks and over her blackheads. "Of course you didn't. I'll give you a hall pass for this class."

Later, Carrie ran through the penance of phys ed. She was trailing in the back of the others, running, panting. ( _Pudding-legs Carrie._ ) Chris Hargensen led the pack as always, slim and long-legged as a grasshopper, dashing forward in her usual place, cutting close against the wall of the school.

Then Carrie stopped in her place and looked up. Something fell from the rooftop. It looked like a long red spear. Perhaps a sudden wind brought down a piece of the old red piping. Chris Hargensen was directly in its path.

The pipe-spear stabbed down. Chris screamed. Then the length of red pipe was on the ground, and Chris' white running shorts were red with blood. There was a deep cut on her thigh. Chris screamed again, fell to the ground, and her friends Helen and Tina rushed to her side.

(let her bleed let her bleed let her BLEED, Carrie thought)

When the other girls took Chris away to the nurse, Carrie was left behind, the slowest and weakest in the class. She went over to the jagged piece of pipe on the ground. She studied it carefully, and a few minutes later, picked apart a length of strong brown twine that had been tied to it. She noticed a series of knots, and a long nail embedded in the ground as well. She walked away.

After school, Carrie found Jason Dean, smoking a cigarette alone out the back of the sports building. Surprised by her own daring, she approached him.

"I think you lost this," Carrie said, and thrust the length of string at the boy in the black coat. Then, she turned on her heel and left him alone. Like a mysterious lady in a radio serial might give a clue and vanish in a shimmer of glamour. Except in Carrie's case, she went home to sewing and Momma and prayers on her knees for two hours in front of Momma's altar.

After that, though, she knew she wasn't alone at school any more. The next time she talked to Jason Dean was outside the cafeteria, where he was smoking again, alone under the eaves and just out of the way of the pouring rain. She liked the rain smell, but the cigarette smoke made her cough.

He threw down the cigarette butt, which sputtered out in the wet gutter. "Greetings and salutations," he said.

"I'm Carrie," Carrie said. "Carrie White. It's short for Carietta, but no one calls me that. I heard your name was Jason Dean." She'd tried to say too much, done the wrong thing again; she bobbed her head down and looked up at him shyly.

"My friends call me J.D. Or, if I had any, that's what I'd ask them to call me." He exhaled, breathing out the last of a long stream of foul-smelling smoke.

"Well ... hello, J.D.," Carrie said. She laughed a little at how silly that sounded. She'd wanted to make a joke and that was not a joke, and that in itself became funny. J.D. cracked a slightly sardonic smile. "How long have you gone to this school?"

"I'm accustomed to moving a lot," he said. "How long have you gone to this school?"

"All my life," Carrie said. "I mean, since ninth grade. I went to Barker Street Grammar School before that, which is pretty much the same thing. Everyone here goes to Barker then Ewen. Then we stay here and never leave."

That was her fear. She'd finish school and then stay with Momma, never going anywhere, locked in her room and eating Momma's suet-soaked apple pie and growing paler and pimplier and fatter, losing all hope. Momma would support her and she'd watch soap operas and game shows all day. She'd sew and sit and pray to Momma's vengeful god at the altar and stay locked in the closet. The demons would crawl out of Momma's painting, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Derrault, men with two heads and women with gigantic slugs oozing out of their mouths and white fleshy bodies twisted and threaded through cracks in the earth, and Carrie would dream of them all night.

She found herself talking about it to this boy, telling him what she had never told anyone else before. She was half afraid he would laugh at her like everyone else, and she gained in confidence when he did not. She told about Momma and getting ducked in the lake over and over by the others at Christian Camp and sewing shirts for weeks before to pay for it and going home early on the train and crying. She talked about Chris Hargensen and Sue Snell and Marie and Rachel and Tina and Donna and Jessica laughing at her, screaming at her, phoning her at home to tell her that pig poop was spelt C-A-R-R-I-E. She talked about invisibility, golden boys like Tommy Ross who never noticed or cared about bullying, about teachers indifferent and laughing behind your back. He listened, smoked another cigarette, and barely spoke, only encouraged her to continue in one or two-word mutterings. It never occurred to Carrie that J.D. had said nothing about himself in return.

"You're better than those assholes," J.D. said, when she'd sputtered to a weak end, with nothing left to say. The swearing shocked her. "You're special. I saw that thing with the light," he said.

Carrie's heart pounded in her chest. "Special? Or freakish, or demonic, or ... or a witch? No, and I don't even know what you're talking about ..."

The bell rang. Carrie ran, stumbling soaking wet through the rain, leaving J.D. behind under the eaves. She fled to class and sat in the back.

And yet she had a friend. She knew Momma would be working late Wednesday night. J.D. walked up to her, after school, and they went together into the woods behind the school, where the younger boys would get muddy in the creek and the older boys would go over there to drink stolen beer and neck with popular girls. They walked into a clearing, where someone had raked out a few circles on the earth, and then J.D. reached into his coat and drew out a heavy bag. He emptied the contents all over the ground.

Marbles. All kinds of marbles, cat's eyes, clams, aggies, onionskins, turtles, yellow bumblebees, smooth china, glittering mica, red and blue swirlies, rainbow clouds, transparent swirls. Children's games. Carrie had looked from a distance when she'd been young, watching the chalk circles and the friends playing together, stealthily admired the bright colours flying into each other. ( _If I had a beautiful marble that looked like the surface of a lake in China I'd never bet it, I'd polish it and keep it and stare into it and imagine .._.). She picked up a stray blue and yellow cat's eye once from a gutter and kept it in her drawer until Momma threw it away and said it was a devil's snare, worldly, games such as that led to gaming and gambling and taking the Lord's name in vain. Large and small, clinking together, the marbles cascaded around Carrie's feet.

"Can you move them?" J.D. asked. "Just move one of them. Try it." Carrie knew he didn't mean, with her hands or feet.

"What makes you think I can do this?" Carrie challenged. When she was little, there was a rain of stones in her house, and she frightened Momma for once. When the girls chased her in the locker room, the lights above them sizzled and broke apart. When little Tommy Erbter, aged five, mocked her like all the rest, she shoved over his tricycle. The only thing J.D. had ever seen her do was the bulb above their heads in math class. Or was it?

He only smiled, lit another one of those disgusting cigarettes, and leaned back on a tree. (Carrie White was alone in the woods with a boy, but she wasn't afraid of him. Maybe she didn't need to be afraid of anyone.)

Carrie watched the marbles. _Flex, like a muscle_ , she thought. Other subjects faded out of her mind, out with sneers and jabs and taunts and legs raised to trip. Out with the feeling of the trees around her, the smell of smoke in her nose. She emptied the pages of her mind, as if somehow she had always known what to do.

She reached out and pushed -

Grunt. It was hard, impossible, wrong. She tried again. She breathed slower, but her heartbeat was faster. Her eyelids closed, narrowed, until all she saw was the biggest cat's eye on the ground, a gory purple and black twisted together. Flex, push out. It was like mastering the sewing machine, from crooked messes to straight threads. She wove it together and pushed out at the world.

The cat's-eye marble rolled away, collided with an aggie then an onionskin and set off a chain reaction, marbles all rushing into each other on the rough ground. There was no trace of wind in the air. It had been all her.

Carrie laughed, opened her eyes, steadied herself by clutching onto a branch. She felt giddy, light-headed, like crunching on a bag full of pop rocks. Her head ached, but she ignored it. She flexed again, and the cat's eye lifted three inches off the ground. Her heart beat like it was going to fly out of her chest. She let the marble drop, panting. _Not too much too soon._ She'd done it. She fell into the boy in black, hugging him, like she wished she could do to Momma, like other girls had with their families - someone to laugh and clap on her victories. She could feel that J.D. too was exultant, not exactly happy but satisfied and hopeful for something she couldn't yet understand.

There were no words for what she was or what she'd done. J.D. seemed to understand that she needed quiet. He walked with her in complete silence, dropping off only two streets away from her house.

"Momma ... wouldn't like it," Carrie said. "I'm sorry. I think she thinks all men are sinful."

"Understood." He turned away, fading into the growing shadows of the evening, the long black coat flapping around his legs.

Carrie walked quickly to her house. She wondered where J.D. had come from. Had she invented him? He was pale like a ghost, drifting in on the wind. He constantly smelt of acrid smoke, maybe even like brimstone. She had no idea where he lived or what he did outside school, and he was exactly what she'd wanted and needed - a friend.

Did she call him into existence, like releasing a dead spirit from an empty vase or rubbing the genie's ring, like she brought the hail of stones from the sky, and by her wish get a dark shadow drifting in through a rip in the fabric of the world?

She pushed open her door, only a few minutes before Momma would come puffing up the drive, and set up her sewing to make it look like she'd been home all along.

"So you've never played poker or seen a movie," J.D. said. He shot a marble into the chalk circle, on top of the concrete surface of the old culvert. "You like beer?" He took a Schlitz can out of his coat and popped the top.

"I've never had that, either. And I don't want to start," Carrie said. She fixed on one of her marbles, not with her hand but with her mind. Breathe. Flex. Feel her pounding heart. Her aim was getting better. She knocked the target onionskin right out of the circle.

J.D. nodded. "Good work." He held up an unlit cigarette. "What about lighting this for me?"

"I wish you wouldn't smoke all the time. I think it's disgusting," Carrie said. She thought maybe that was a little harsh, and softened it with a joke. "I guess you're everything they warn girls about, in _Seventeen_ magazine and teachers' speeches. You ride a motorbike, you swear, you smoke, you drink, and ..." She stopped talking as the logical last teenage vice in the list came into her mind. Her cheeks flushed red.

"For-ni-cate?" He finished the sentence for her, grinning maliciously. "Not for a while. But, hey, if you say the word ..."

He was part joking, but also part serious. He reached out to touch her hand, his fingers cold and steady. Carrie thought about him - she did like him, it might not be so bad - and suddenly she knew what she wanted.

"No," she said, and let him go. "I don't want to hold your hand. Or kiss you. Or ... anything else."

She liked - Tommy Ross, the golden boy of Ewen High School, clean-cut and gentle and happy, A-student and sensitive and the star of the baseball team, she knew with a sudden melting clarity. Not this one, sharp-edged and smelling of smoke, with green hungry eyes like a cat on the trail of a mouse. He was her friend, he stood up for her. But nothing in her wanted more than friendship with him.

"Do you mind?" she asked stupidly. _Are you angry at me, are you going to hurt me_ was the real question in her mind. Everyone warned about men who got girls alone, and then they fell, sinful women, fallen women, a joke and a horror everywhere.

"No." He distanced himself from her, like a gentleman would in some old-fashioned book, sitting further back from the marble game and relaxing. "Date rape isn't one of my hobbies. I shouldn't have tried that on with you, kid."

"You're the first and only person who ever asked me," Carrie confessed softly. "And you're being nice about it, and I'm sorry I can't ..."

"Do you think I'm your friend or not?" he broke in quickly. She nodded, breathlessly. "Then that's what we'll be. Deal or no deal?"

Jason Dean offered her his right hand. She shook it, sealing a bargain, like two boys or two girls might declare a blood bond between them. A pact to shield and protect each other, or fight back at each other's side.

Like brother and sister. Carrie tripped a switch with her mind that was growing more and more familiar by the day, and the end of the cigarette lit up. J.D. watched it burn, and smiled.

The day was damp and drizzly. Carrie wore her old raincoat, too tight under the armpits, hood falling off her head every time she breathed. It was an awful bright-sick-green color that people noticed and stared at, with pity, scorn, and ridicule. She kept her head down, her wet bookbag heavy on her back.

Norma Watson rode on her new bicycle, a sleek easy-riding black Windsor, her lean legs pumping her faster than the wind. She was one of those who stared at Carrie and giggled behind her hands, passed comments to Tina Blake about how many PIMPLES Carrie had and couldn't she BEAR to wear pantyhose instead of those horrible scratchy stockings each and every day.

Carrie passed a low-slung piece of the pavement, filled with water. The bicycle sped up. Then the tide of water splashed out. Norma deliberately swerved and drove through the puddle, and the water soaked Carrie from waist to ankle. She saw and felt Norma's grin, Norma's idea _just a little prank worth it to see the silly look on that cow-pudding face_ -

Carrie brushed at the mud on her skirt. She was thinking it over.

"I have a suggestion," J.D. offered. "Bicycle brakes start at the handlebars, then run down to the calipers, which pull on the wheels. Let's say there were two screws loose. Like lifting up a marble."

She practiced for two evenings straight after school, twisting metal nuts off screws. The control was the key part, the subtlety. _You can do a lot with a little push_ , J.D. said quietly, _like playing chess instead of checkers._

He suggested the place, too. Carrie left early for school (Momma I have to finish the homework) and walked toward Norma Watson's side of town. Last night it rained something fierce, and the ground was thick with mud though the sky was a dry blue-grey. She and J.D. stood below an oak tree, almost invisible under the dappled shadows, waiting and watching, the water on the ground sparkling like diamonds as the sun rose. Old Mrs. McCarthy hung out her sheets in her garden, perfectly blue-white-bleached and flapping in the breeze, and she didn't see them either. Mrs. McCarthy kicked her pet cat out of the way and hummed an Elvis song, then headed back behind her pantry window. A long time later (I'll be late for school but does it matter? No, it doesn't matter at all now), Norma came cycling down the road.

The bicycle in motion was more difficult to catch hold of. Carrie's breath caught in her throat (what if she failed what if she was stupid), then she reached deeper for the power inside her. She knew where the two screws were, had memorized them from diagrams J.D. gave her on notebook paper. As her breath slowed down time too seemed to come to a crawl, and she fixed on the two tiny little places by the bike's spinning wheels. _Undo_. The brake lines flew free.

Norma Watson tried to slow down, tried to turn, but she'd lost all control. The bike skidded sideways. She flew in through Mrs. McCarthy's hedge - into her washing line - then head-over-heels down in the muddy grass on the lawn. Norma brought a few of the white sheets down with her, and flailed helplessly on the ground like a brown-stained ghost. She wailed and howled.

"You little brat, look what you've done to my washing!" Mrs. McCarthy ran out at a fast clip, brandishing her walking stick. "This is the last time I'll have you kids and your God-forsaken pranks here!"

Carrie ran, trying to stifle her laughter with her hands stuffed in her mouth. They fled in the opposite direction, with Norma still blinded by muddy sheets and Old Mrs. McCarthy too deep in preoccupation and severe reprimand to recognize them. They ran full-tilt along the ground, pounding the pavement toward the school, and only stopped when Carrie couldn't run any more. She doubled down and held on to her knees, panting and still laughing like mad. The bell rang and she didn't even care that she'd be late for roll call.

"I've never had so much fun in my life and I almost don't care who knows it," Carrie gasped.

"You deserve some fun, kid," J.D. said. He snapped his fingers in his left hand, then two lengths of cardboard suddenly appeared in his right, like a magic trick. "I've got two tickets for the Westover cinema tonight. Late-late-late showing of a flick called _A Little Romance_ , full Technicolor. It's cheesy kiddie shit. You'll like it."

Carrie shook her head. "Momma will never let me."

"Also brought you these." He handed her an almost-empty pill bottle, blank and unlabeled. A few things rattled around in it. "Sleeping tablets. Give Momma these and sneak out the window. I'll be waiting on the corner, if you're game."

"Supposing I'm not?" Carrie took the pills anyway. She couldn't just slip her mother drugs and leave her in the middle of the night. Or could she?

"Then I won't hold it against you." J.D. shrugged. "It's all under your control."

Carrie was home early, waiting for Momma. She finished sewing the sleeves on a new dress, swept the floor and wiped down the pictures and statues in the living room, the crucified Jesus and the portrait of Adam and Eve driven out of the garden and the Black Forest cuckoo clock. She warmed up Momma's favorite cinnamon tea for her and left it waiting until she came home, four-thirty pm after she finished at four at the Blue Ribbon Laundry in Chamberlain Center. She and Momma sat and worked together, Momma on some doilies and Carrie altering an old blouse, with the victrola playing Mr. P.P. Bliss' songs about God and Jesus and nautical metaphors.

When Momma brought out her pie after dinner, Carrie carved into her slice with no hint of refusal. Her mother was quiet and relatively gentle, in a good mood. Carrie breathed in deeply.

"Momma," she said, laying her fork down on her plate, "do you think a boy and girl can be just friends, like brother and sister?"

There was a dead silence. The blood rushed to Momma's cheeks. "Child, you are a woman now," she thundered. "The men will follow you like flies follow meat. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. To Eve the Lord gave the Curse of Blood. To the children and the children's children come the Evil and the Sorrow and the Black Man. The first sin was Intercourse, and from it came the Curse of Murder as Cain slew Abel. I sinned unto the Lord with my husband Ralph, and from my sin the devil's child was born. Ralph and I lay belly to belly and prayed that the Sin might not visit us, but the Crafty Serpent gave us the Curse of Whoredom, not once but twice. The Curse of Wickedness is upon us even now. Let the witches be cast out from among your midst, and let them be burned with cleansing fire and slain by the holy sword.

"What is the name of this boy, Carrie? Let us pray beneath the altar, that your sin may be forgiven!" Her eyes flashed blue rage, and Carrie cowered as she always had done.

"There ... is no boy, Momma. It was only a thought. A sinful thought," she said.

"Into the closet, Carrie."

The closet was where Momma kept Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Derrault, lit with a ghastly blue lightbulb that was never switched off. Momma led her in, and locked the door. Carrie always told herself that this time it would be different, this time she would not break, and every time she gave in and stared at the demons and begged and pleaded to be let go from her nightmare. Sometimes she'd been locked in for more than a day and she could still smell the echoes of her own waste trapped inside the closet, permanently staining the floor no matter how she scrubbed it clean.

She remembered what she could do, and like a flame her power surged within her.

(let me out let me out let me OUT)

(just a little longer Carrie slow down and wait wait wait but not too long)

Carrie closed her eyes in the blue-blackness. _Jesus in sweet mercy bring us to that dear land of rest._ She slowed her breathing down, though her heart beat as fast as ever. _We are volunteers in the army of the Lord, and we'll never give o'er the fight till the foe are put to the sword._ The flames burned inside her, thinking, wondering, knowing. She ground her teeth together. _Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her._ Momma had never given her anything worth having, had crushed her and stepped on her head as the fiery serpent. _I don't have to surrender._

(Momma let me out let me OUT)

Momma was praying at the place of the altar, her head on the embroidered cloth, leaking sweat stains on the white silk. Carrie knew it and could feel her. Momma screamed about the woman Jezebel and the Curse of Blood and the serpent's teeth.

Carrie reached inside her, and (Momma let me out let me OUT) whispered to her without words. The Lord saith that your daughter is penitent. The Lord saith that your daughter must go to school tomorrow, and bear witness to the ungodly and the whoremongers and pestilences. The Lord saith that he is pleased with you as a virtuous woman, Margaret White.

Carrie's feet were pins and needles, and she kept her head bowed when Momma undid the lock. _I am penitent, Momma. I am very penitent._ It had been an hour. She stumbled away from the altar and into the kitchen, where she dutifully made Momma her last cup of tea for the night. She drenched it with cinnamon.

"It is very strong," Momma complained. "Make it better next time, Carrie." She drank the tea anyway, and her face grew drowsy and slack when the crushed pills began to do their work. Carrie helped her up to bed, and with great difficulty pulled on the nightgown over her large and heavy frame. Momma hit the mattress and immediately began to snore. Carrie stroked Momma's hair back over the pillow, and left without another glance.

This was her, Carrie White, dressing in her darkest clothing, thick navy blue pinafore over a grey blouse, climbing down from her bedroom window with the lights out, hoping and praying that no neighbors would see her. This was Carrie White, walking out to the corner of the junction, looking for a boy who was only visible in the darkness by the tiny red pinprick glow of his cigarette. This was Carrie White, wearing a black helmet that hid her face from anyone who looked, riding on the back of a motorbike all the way into Westover, where no one there would know her name.

The movie was magical, bright Technicolor showing her Paris and Venice and the Bridge of Sighs, places she'd never visit, and it was only slightly spoiled by J.D.'s cutting commentary whenever he thought something in it was silly.

After the film, when everyone was milling around in the lobby, Carrie watched some of the faces; were they as excited as she was, did they know how breathtakingly lucky they were? Another wave of people spilt out from the second-screen theater, just finished some horror film. (She probably wouldn't have liked that one. The woman screaming and the flames licking on the poster reminded her too much of Momma's hell pictures.) There was no one she knew here, no one who knew her. She looked at faces and made up stories - the old man with the mustache shaped like a fish tail has nineteen great-grandchildren; the college girl in the polka-dot skirt is Miranda in a Shakespeare play; the little red-haired boy who probably snuck in gave his sister a doll for her birthday last year; the cashier's going home at the end of the night to a mother with a twinset and pearls who kisses her goodnight -

"Are you all alone out here, sweet thing?" Carrie all but jumped out of her skin. A man she didn't know approached her. She smelt something like alcohol on his breath. He wore a tiny brown mustache and leant too close to her.

That was funny. J.D. was right beside her, although he was turned away, looking at the horror poster.

"No, I'm not alone," Carrie stammered. And from somewhere inside herself, Carrie found that fire again. She stood tall and spoke louder. "And don't you ever call me sweet thing."

"Wha'ever." The man coughed, stumbled, and spun away from her. She walked away. J.D. caught up, finding his way through the crowd alongside her.

Carrie looked up at the spinning stars, above the racing motorbike. Back home, Momma was waiting for her. She'd never had such a wonderful night.

And she knew - she _knew_ , leaning against his black coat and feeling the flap of it in the wind - what J.D. felt. He was mostly ice cold, with barely any feelings at all, and what he liked most about Carrie was her power and their shared goal. They were allies in wartime, not innate friends drawn by a smile or personal affinity or an innocent game. Underneath the ice, he had a core of anger that blazed like an inferno. Carrie hadn't looked much into his memories, but she'd glimpsed brief images that were painful and violent, flashes of light and thunder and even buildings collapsing in a haze of annihilation like bombs. He wanted to see that destruction brought down on their shared enemies.

And yet he bought her a cat's eye marble, listened to her, took her to her first film, and treated her like a friend.

"Do you believe in God?" she asked above the hum of the bike.

"Let's quote Nietzsche - God is dead," J.D. said.

Surely he was only trying to shock her, joke with her. She giggled nervously. _Jesus, Lord and Savior, I know I did wrong tonight but I am no longer alone._ "You can't say that. Jesus Christ rose from the cross to live again."

"He didn't mean that God is literally dead," J.D. said. "More like, we made God up and then we killed him. And that sucks for everyone, since people used to have anchors to the old standards, however bullshit they were. Now they have nothing, so they become lost and confused."

"And cruel," Carrie added. _Jesus loves me and I still believe._ In a God who could be merciful, a God who didn't have to be as cruel as Momma's God. If people had nothing in themselves, they made other people's lives a living hell.

"The good thing about God being dead is, we get to make our own standards. We killed God, and we can become like gods. Especially people like you." The last words were like flames lighting on J.D.'s mouth as they found their way out.

"I never knew if these powers came from up high or down low," Carrie said. ( _The devil's whore or a child of God._ )

"It doesn't matter. You need to make your own meaning by the way you use them," J.D. said, and again Carrie felt a pull toward the black destruction that whirled inside him.

She stepped off the motorbike in front of her house. It was still dark and she considered the climb back up to her room.

"Thank you," she said. The noise of the bike soon died away in the distance.

The next two days, Momma was vomiting and puking out her stomach the whole day long, and Carrie had to stay home from school with her and clean up the vomit and look after her until she felt better. It was still worth it, she thought.

Carrie wondered if they saw any difference in her, back at school. Maybe she was stronger now, maybe they saw that and wanted to take her down a peg. All the same, they never would stop.

"Who are you going to prom with, Carrie?" Rachel Spies asked, red mouth curling like a cat licking up milk. She asked because she knew the answer would be no one, and the trend caught around the other girls like wildfire.

"Carrie, are you going to the prom with Elvis?" Mary Thibodeau mocked, and glanced meaningfully at Chris Hargensen as if she wanted to seek her approval.

"Are you Principal Grayle's hot date for the prom, Carrie?" Tina suggested.

"Is this your gorgeous prom dress, Carrie?" Jessica Upshaw asked her, and showed her a length of cloth exactly the same bright-green-sick color as Carrie's old raincoat, dug deep out of the school linen stalls and then rubbed in something disgusting. It was holely, muddy, and stunk. "This is exactly your colour!" She threw the cloth, laughing, and Chris Hargensen sitting beside her watched and smirked and was almost content with the design she had made.

Carrie still felt sickened from it as she left the school. Something new for you today, J.D. had promised, and so she went to the clearing.

He'd been drinking, empty beer cans at his feet. Carrie made a face. Alcohol smelt bad to her, and she knew she still didn't want to try it herself.

"Not the surprise. Just some target practice," he said. He drew a gun from his coat, a small black pistol, and gave it carefully into Carrie's hands. She felt the cold metal weight of it. She'd never seen one so close before.

"Is it real?" she asked, frightened. Guns were bad, she should know that. Very bad.

"Yes. It's power, but it's not as powerful as you," J.D. said. "I wanted to show you that I can protect you. You get tired when you use it, I've seen that. So when you need backup ... this is it."

She was clumsy, holding it. Sometimes people went to shooting ranges and shot clay ducks for fun, and this was surely close enough for that. J.D. corrected her grip, patiently talking her through positioning her hands, lining up her sight, and getting ready to pull the trigger. Aim low, he told her, don't want to go wide.

Her aim was awful, but became a little better over time. He nailed one of the crushed beer cans to a tree and she tried a higher target. The barrel was hot as fire in her hands after Carrie let the trigger go.

She wasn't particularly good at this, she thought, but she liked the heat and the explosion. She thought that perhaps she could set fires as strong as this, by herself rather than with a weapon. She could even hear the crackle of electricity in her head, flowing through the wires around the school. "I have to go," she said.

The prom was eight days away.

"Carrie, who's taking you to prom?" Chris Hargensen hissed at her, and this time she had an answer.

"Tommy Ross is."

Tommy Ross, the golden boy. Tommy Ross, the most popular boy in school. Tommy Ross, kind and clean-cut and uncomplicated and mostly good. He asked her, in Period Five study hall, swept over to her desk and convinced her that he genuinely meant it and if she didn't have a date already could she come with him. Carrie told her only friend about it, practically walking on air. She'd had a crush on Tommy since seventh grade, she admitted. She'd thought that he would never even look at her. Now she could admit it, make a dress and corsage, be picked up from Momma's house and ride to the gymnasium for the dance.

"If you're happy then I'm happy, kid." J.D. sighed. "If he lets you down, just tell me." He pronounced 'if' like it was 'when'.

"He won't," Carrie said, confident, too confident. "He's decent. One of the decent boys." She stepped lightly, walking over the green spring grass. "What was she like?" she asked suddenly, a curiosity awakened in her.

"Who?"

"Your girlfriend," Carrie said. "The one you, um, forni - um, with ... before." _And what was it like_ , she wanted to ask, _absolutely not the details but maybe the kissing bits, whether it's good with someone nice or not._

A malicious look glinted in his eyes. "I never said she was a girl. Be more open minded, Carrie." He was deeply amused by her instinctive, scandalous shock. "But, yeah, she was a girl. She was strong and she had power. In the end, she didn't want or need me around."

"Was she nice?" Carrie asked.

"Do you think I'm nice?" J.D. gestured to himself. He was nice to her, perhaps, but that was just about it, Carrie thought - "You've seen how the world treats nice, decent people. It chews them up and spits them out. That's why we have our mission. We need to make the world a decent place for people who are decent."

"We can be not-nice together, as long as people deserve it," Carrie said. She was happy enough, in the fading afternoon, to wish no harm or pranks on anyone at all. "I know you don't want to go to prom, but do you want me to mend your shirt?" She'd noticed the bits of it she could see above the black coat were ripped and torn. "I like to sew, I truly do."

"I don't know about that. It's in pretty bad shape," J.D. said. They were walking below the shadow of a wide tree, and Carrie had to squint to look at it properly. Below the black coat, she thought she saw nothing more than tatters. As if something terrible had happened to rip his clothes and skin apart, or maybe it was only a trick of the light.

He turned to go in the opposite direction to her. She was running late to be home anyway.

Carrie's world of perfect romantic floating on air lasted for a day, but it was still sweet even after she lost a little bit of illusion.

"Present for you." J.D. brought a small, pliable square out of his sleeve.

It was a Polaroid of Tommy Ross and Sue Snell. Sue Snell, who'd joined Chris Hargensen to set upon Carrie in the locker room. Tommy and Sue were kissing, mouth to mouth, with no room for anyone else in the world except for the two of them.

"Found it in Sue's locker. He doesn't love you. He's an asshole like the rest of them." J.D. set the snap down, on the ground between them. "You deserve to know the truth."

Carrie sat down on the wet grass. She drew her knees up to her chest, and thought it through, sadness still mixed with hope. "They didn't wrong me by falling in love," Carrie whispered. "It's atonement. From not just Tommy, from Tommy and Sue both. They want to say they were sorry." She understood about atonement.

"And you forgive them, just like that? After the living hell they put you through?" J.D.'s voice was low and weighted with bitterness.

"It mostly wasn't them," Carrie said. "Let them be. They're decent."

"As you like. What about Chris Hargensen, then?" J.D. attacked. "She wants to destroy you. She lost her prom ticket for what she did to you. She's planning something to wreck the night. And her creep boyfriend, Billy Nolan - he's out for the sort of fun that destroys people's lives. Then your crazy mother. She thinks she might kill you for being a witch, never mind letting you go to some sinful prom. You know all this as well as I do."

Carrie knew. She'd reached out and felt the hate in their minds, in their shallow vicious rat-crawling souls.

(crack their BONES crack their HEADS and let in the WORMS, she still sometimes thought - )

Carrie got to her feet. She took J.D.'s hand, right hand to right hand, as when they promised alliance and friendship, armed soldiers willing to fight a war. "If something happens, then I will fight back," she swore. "But they deserve a chance."

"Then I promise I won't stop them beforehand," J.D. said, and the fiery inferno of hell rose below his ice. "They can choose to pull the trigger or not. If they do, I'll be there fighting by your side."

The flames rose up within Carrie, and she welcomed her power as part of her. Wind whirled around her, the trees seemed to sing, and the electric lines sparked overhead.

—

NEWS BULLETIN - MAY 27, CHAMBERLAIN

OUT OF CONTROL FIRE IS RAGING IN EWEN (U-WIN) HIGH SCHOOL GYMNASIUM. STUDENTS WERE ATTENDING A SCHOOL DANCE. THREE CHAMBERLAIN FIRE TRUCKS WERE CALLED, BUT THE BLAZE HAS NOT YET BEEN CONTAINED. CASUALTY LISTS ARE FORTHCOMING. THE FIRE IS THOUGHT TO HAVE STARTED BY AN ELECTRICAL FAULT IN THE WALLS. IT IS BELIEVED AS MANY AS ONE HUNDRED AND TEN STUDENTS WERE IN ATTENDANCE. UNCONFIRMED THAT TWO STUDENTS FLED THE BLAZE IN THE DIRECTION OF CENTRAL CHAMBERLAIN. WE HAVE NO RECORD YET OF SURVIVORS.

—


End file.
